de scribe. break it down little scratches, help us process smells and sights and warm soft fur and share this knowledge with our kin. (and ourselves! this is what is perhaps most perplexing this soothing, cooing impulse to let ourselves know what we are thinking and feeling!)
dear stephanie, translation is a use of language that allows us to be other than ourselves. we might say the same of reading. we are blurred, dissolved, even as we remain intact. i deeply, passionately, electrifyingly want the world to be different than it is. i become frustrated when language cannot make it so. i believe that languages (not exclusive of intuition, feeling, imagination, blind perception) are the building blocks of thought and articulation. without different languages, we cannot envision or enact a different world. what do i mean by “different languages”? i mean speaking more than one, that’s for sure. the humility and compassion (toward self and other) and tenacity and openness required to learn another language, another culture. i also mean literally reconfiguring what is possible to say. and therefore speaking in ways that make new configurations possible. when i’d just finished graduate school, i was so frustrated and alienated by what i perceived as widespread willingness to use language in ways that maintain the status quo (wheel spinning without even that slight movement), i began to write not nonsense exactly, but perhaps utterly sonic sense. i didn’t want to speak the language of normativity and acquiescence. i wanted to write an epic that would pique. i abandoned ship mid-stream, partly because i moved to mexico and became immersed in another language myself, and partly because i was worried that the only audience for such torqued textual forays would be an audience with which i am already in conversation. i want to speak to the person i do not yet know. and more than that, i want to listen to the person i do not yet know, and to the people i already know and love. xoxo jen
dear jen, this “deeply, passionately, electrifyingly” calls for the preface of dear. it touches a space in my heart which lets longing for anything sit alone—guarded and mocked by a cruel false buddha with a chicken grease chin.
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